The Evil Things I’ve Done (In Video Games)

Few narrative conclusions left a lasting impression on me like the campy ‘bad guy’ ending of the 1995 strategy video game Command & Conquer.

In this final scene, series antagonist Kane (Joseph D. Kucan), leader of ‘Nod’ (the bad guys), is relishing the player’s victory over the ‘Global Defense Initiative’ (the good guys) and the completion of a ‘cyber temple’ capable of hacking into the planet’s defence systems. “Watch as my Netrunners dance through the web of cyberspace,” he tells us before a 90s FMV CGI cyberbattle unfolds in what might be the most ludicrous depiction of hacking ever put to screen.

Once the Netrunners complete their mission, Kane prompts the player to decide which part of the world should feel their wrath, presenting a split screen of four iconic buildings: the White House, the British Houses of Parliament, the Eiffel Tower and the Brandenburg Gate.

“You have done much to aid the brotherhood towards this final victory,” Kane elaborates, “The choice, my friend, is yours.” With a click of a mouse or a button, a space laser will blow up the player’s chosen monument before guitars whirl for the final credits. If memory serves me right, I chose the White House.

Everyone always picks the White House.

By today’s standards, this ending is more ridiculous than dastardly — an example of the silly-good fun that only the 90s could produce. But it sure blew my mind when I first experienced it as a kid. Of course, I’d already been playing as the bad guys for several hours to get to this point. Yet till then, being “bad” meant little more than being the red team instead of the yellow team. Now, for the first time in my memory, I had done something truly evil in a video game.

I wouldn’t say I felt guilty. After all, I had only done what the game had asked. And it was just a game. I did consider that I might not want to show this to Mum and Dad. Yet mostly, I just thought it was fun to see something other than the usual “congrats, you saved the world” stuff I was used to seeing.

But blowing up the White House was just the beginning.

Since playing Command & Conquer all those years ago, I have performed more than my fair share of heinous acts in virtual environments — enough to give those Netrunners a run for their money. I’ve set Sims on fire, rained thunder down on innocents as a vengeful god, monopolised markets as a tycoon, caused pile-ups on motorways and killed legions of men by sword, rocket launcher, and goo gun all in the good name of fun. And I’ve felt quite guiltless because, again, I know all I’m doing is playing games.

Yet there have also been times when I have felt differently — times when being evil felt reprehensible — times when I not only resisted the urge to do dastardly things but also went against a game’s internal logic and my best interests to do what I felt was ‘good.’ There have even been occasions when I had to turn off games or reload them because I could not continue in the game’s world with the memory of what I had done.

It’s a funny thing to be able to feel a kind of dissociation that allows you to do terrible deeds in one game and feel the weight of your conscience in another.

But does it mean anything? What role does morality play when it comes to pixels and code?

While games today are increasingly ‘open’ and offer greater potential for ‘reprehensible’ acts, being bad in video games is hardly a new phenomenon.

Perhaps one of the first titles to enable bad behaviour was 1976’s Death Race. Developed by Exidy, Death Race was essentially a modified version of an earlier game called Destruction Derby, where players were tasked with crashing into cars to accrue points. The only difference with Death Race was that the goal was now to crash into humanoid “gremlins.” Sounds pretty mild, right? But it caused quite a stir back in the day, resulting in what could be described as one of the first true moral panics in video game history.

Fast-forward ten years to 1986, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, an Atari 2600 game based on the movie of the same name, caused more finger-wagging from concerned parents. The game was unique for its time, in that players controlled the villain — in this case, the chainsaw-wielding madman known as Leatherface. Sounds gory, until you remember we’re talking about the Atari 2600, a console that could only depict this action using simple dots and blocks on the screen.

However, by the time the mid-90s rolled around, you could perform all sorts of malicious acts in far-greater detail, from helping Nazi Germany win World War II (Panzer General) to performing gratuitous acts of violence in cold blood (Mortal Kombat) and actually running over innocent pedestrians (Carmageddon).

Meanwhile, seemingly innocent titles like The Sims and RollerCoaster Tycoon allowed players to subvert the ‘guardian angel’ mechanics of these games by engaging in activities reminiscent of a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass. For example, players could build theme park rides that led to certain doom or create inescapable brick walls to trap helpless virtual characters.

The 2001 game Black & White played off gamers’ apparent desires to play god by tasking them with actually being a god, one who could be gracious or malicious to their worshippers. Of course, when a game says you can be good or evil, what it’s actually saying is: “You can be evil.” And ‘evil’ is exactly what I was when I got the chance to play this game as a pre-teen on a friend’s computer.

Whether I was throwing people into the ocean for complaining, resolving petty disputes with fireballs, or feeding my worshipers to my giant pet tiger just to see what would happen, I sure did have fun mimicking the most vengeful and petty god imaginable. At least, I had fun for about ten to fifteen minutes before I inevitably got bored and made the switch from old-testament nihilist to merciful new-testament protector.

Here’s the thing I find with being evil in video games: once the novelty wears off, being bad is rarely as interesting as being good in the long run. Reigning terror down on my citizens in Black & White quelled a curiosity in me, but it didn’t exactly challenge me in the way helping the little NPCs (non-playable characters) with their problems did. Once I played enough of the game to see the little beings of its world as “my people,” that morbid curiosity was soon replaced by the urge to do right by them and the guilt I felt when I didn’t. And I think this is true with many of these open-world-style games.

I suspect that most people who have played The Sims have tried killing one of the virtual characters placed in their care at least once, just to see what would happen. However, a playthrough of The Sims focused solely on torturing them would not only be arguably psychotic but also tediously dull.

It takes a particular kind of game to turn a player’s sinister curiosities into something that challenges and compels them in the long run. But if we’re talking about games that let you be diabolical, there is really only one standard from which to judge all others: Grand Theft Auto (GTA).

I must admit, I fell off the Grand Theft Auto bandwagon some time ago. I only briefly played the last couple of releases from Rockstar’s infamous series and neither did much for me. Nonetheless, GTA, specifically GTA: Vice City, was my jam back in the day. And I still don’t think there are many games where being bad is quite as thrilling and oddly humorous.

One thing that really sticks with me about that game is the paramedic mechanic. If someone gets shot on the streets of Vice City, there’s a good chance that an ambulance will spawn nearby to revive them. They don’t take the fallen citizen to the hospital or acknowledge the perpetrator of the violence (typically, you); they just revive them right there. Then, the once-dead NPC walks off as if nothing ever happened, even if you’re standing right there with the shotgun that took them down in the first place.

I think this surreal mechanic — designed primarily so you can steal the ambulance — speaks volumes about the kind of experience the game wants you to have and the inconsequential, goofy role that violence plays in that experience.

I think GTA: Vice City does two things very well when it comes to enabling bad behavior. Firstly, it ensures your evil deeds come with a challenge.

Contrary to belief, I don’t think the fun in the GTA series lies in the malicious acts you can perform on the city’s innocent bystanders, but in the chaotic chases and gunfights that follow. Unlike in a game like Black & White or The Sims where no one tries or could ever stop your heinous behaviour, in GTA: Vice City you’ll soon find yourself in trouble with the police, rival gangs, SWAT teams and even the United States army when you step out of line.

Crucially, the game also makes it easy to act like a nefarious prick and not feel all that guilty about it, even when the cops are chasing you down. And that’s all because of how the game world is presented and the interactions you can and can’t have.

The world of GTA: Vice City is loosely based on Miami and Miami Beach. But really, it’s more like a caricature of those places, full to the brim with one-note, paper-thin stereotypes. You can’t communicate with the NPCs that walk its streets, and the quips they blurt out don’t paint a pretty picture. Hell, even the old ladies in this game will happily call you a chickenshit and demand you get outta their way just for existing.

Moreover, when these NPCs disappear from the screen, they disappear altogether. The random people you meet are just that — random. No one who walks the streets of Vice City or drives its roads is really going anywhere. They exist entirely for two purposes: to provide the illusion that you are in a populated city and to have violence enacted upon them.

If that sounds like a cruel, cynical, shallow world to you, that’s because it is. And that’s kind of the whole point. You wouldn’t be able to have as much fun in a game like GTA: Vice City if it were presented in any other way. There’s no way it would have shipped some 14 million-plus units if you cared about the people who inhabited its fictional city. Grand Theft Auto V probably wouldn’t have become the fastest-selling entertainment product in history if it hadn’t taken a fairly similar approach.

But what happens when you allow similar evil to exist in a game where procedurally-generated and non-intractable NPCs are replaced with characters who have been individually written? Say a game like Fallout 3?

On the surface, the game world of a title like Fallout 3 bears some similarities to that found in the GTA series. If anything, its post-apocalyptic wasteland is even more cynical and prone to wicked deeds than the crime-ridden streets of a place like Vice City. Moreover, the potential for player-performed cruelty here is magnitudes greater and comes with its own unique challenges to keep players invested should they choose to go down that path.

Want to blow someone’s head off because you don’t like the way they looked at you? Well, you can do that in Fallout 3. Want to destroy a town of residents in an atomic cloud? You can do that too. Want to turn a homeless man into a pile of radiated sludge or make a child NPC into an orphan? Yep, that’s all possible in the wastelands.

You could do these things, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you would.

I’ve never managed to stomach an evil playthrough in the Fallout universe. That’s not to judge those who do manage evil playthroughs, but I think it is psychologically tougher to be a bad guy in the Fallout universe. And this is down to how games like Fallout 3 put a heavier weight behind your actions.

While crime does bear consequences in GTA: Vice City, it is still only ever a police chase away from being forgotten history. No one turns around in-game and says, “Hey, aren’t you that guy who killed all those people?” Police chiefs don’t open an investigation into your whereabouts, and nobody mourns the poor lady you ran over yesterday. Instead, the world simply generates the next bunch of nameless NPCs for your entertainment.

However, things don’t work that way in an RPG like Fallout 3. Not only can you interact more with the NPCs in its game world, but most of them have names, jobs, relationships and stories to tell. And your actions upon them have a lasting impact that doesn’t go away once they leave your field of view.

For instance, if you kill a shopkeeper in Fallout 3, the store doesn’t just reopen with a new face like in GTA: Vice City. Instead, the store stays shut forever. And the characters in the world remember and maybe even appear to mourn the dead shopkeeper. If you’re unlucky, town guards will remember your deeds as well. Of course, we’re still just talking code and pixels. But we’re talking code with good (or at least intentional) writing behind it. As a result, it’s easier to get sucked into the idea that these are real people you’re interacting with — people with whom you feel some moral obligation towards.

But you don’t just have to take my word for that. Studies have found that the presence of fleshed-out characters in video games has a significant impact on how players interact and feel about them, with one study published in 2010 by academics from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam noting that:

“People felt guiltier when they shot video game characters whose private social background was known than when the character’s background was unknown.”

Of course, it bears saying that not everyone in the Fallout universe will demand your mercy and trust. Indeed, there are some truly despicable citizens in the wastelands of the Fallout series. But, in my view, their existence only makes evil feel even less appealing. Just as we might not want to associate ourselves with certain unsavoury characters in real life, it doesn’t feel particularly good to side with them in a game like Fallout 3.

A particularly famous and often-cited example of this in Fallout 3 is the choice players are given regarding the fate of a place called Megaton — a shanty-town in the wastelands that, for whatever reason, has been built around an unexploded atomic bomb that plays into a narrative where players are faced with choosing between good and evil and the rewards that come with each.

The residents of Megaton are a ragtag bunch. Some are warm and welcoming, others are stand-offish and wary, and some are just outright strange. Overall, you get the sense that the people of Megaton are just regular individuals trying to survive and make a life in a dangerous world. They’re there because they have nowhere else to go, and the game does a pretty good job of conveying that to the player, not only through dialogue but the way the town and its residents look and dress.

But there’s one man in Megaton who seems quite out of place — a stranger in a suit called Mr Burke who offers you a substantial financial reward to detonate the bomb at the town’s centre. He represents a man called Allistair Tenpenny, the founder and owner of a high-rise called Tenpenny Tower.

Allistair and the tower’s other residents live very different lives to those living in Megaton. Not only are they far wealthier, but they also seem removed from the chaos of the wasteland, which they see as little more than a playground. They are, as Allistair describes them, “the right type of tenants with the right type of assets.” The residents of Megaton don’t fit this mold, and he commissions Mr. Burke to eliminate them seemingly on a whim:

“I complained off hand one day about how I thought that heap of metal on the horizon was a bit of an eyesore. Mister Burke offered to take care of it.”

Detonating the bomb is not the player’s only option, though. Instead, you can disable the bomb to ensure nothing nefarious can ever come of it. While there’s not nearly as much financial incentive to do the right thing here, it nonetheless feels like the better option..

If you disable the bomb, the Megaton residents will herald you as a hero and your exploits spread far and wide across the wastelands over the radio. You will even be granted keys to a house, and it feels as if you’ve earned your place in the community. Detonate the bomb, and you have to watch all that go up in a mushroom cloud of smoke while Allistair Tenpenny calls for his scotch.

Sure, you get a bunch of money and the keys to an apartment, but the game ensures you remember what you did. Not only is Megaton reduced to rubble, but refugees begin appearing across the wasteland, rangers attempt to hunt you down endlessly, and people reference your deeds in dialogue. In other words, the game does what it can to make you feel guilty. And it kind of works. Or at least, it worked enough that I, and many other players, found it genuinely difficult to detach enough from the game’s world to act entirely in self-interest in a manner that would be all too easy in a game like GTA: Vice City.

Of course, not everyone is likely to feel as duty-bound to be a good guy in a game like Fallout 3. Instead, the boundaries of moral engagement or disengagement in a virtual experience are often personal and defy easy explanation.

In her article for the Guardian, ‘I can’t kill a wolf but will happily watch a Sim drown’, Amelia Tait notes as much, and how different players (and herself) have differing “ethical limitations.” For example, a player may feel compelled to pick up litter even while killing enemy humans. Likewise, they might gleefully watch theme park patrons get thrown from rides in RollerCoaster Tycoon but feel compelled to go vegan while playing Zelda.

Nonetheless, while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a game that adds weight to moral choices is inherently better than one that doesn’t, I think something fascinating happens when we feel invested in a game in a way that goes beyond the desire to complete it — when the choice between good and evil isn’t just a quirk but something that looms over you, prompting you to question your decisions, not just whether you made a good choice for the well-being of your in-game character, but the game world you have immersed yourself into.

Of course, in real life, our choices are not always so black and white (no pun intended). Rarely do we find ourselves with choices quite as comically over-the-top as: “will you blow up this town for a briefcase of cash?” Instead, making the right choices in real life is a more complicated and murky business. Sometimes it’s difficult to determine whether a right choice even exists, especially when the idea of “good” comes up against something we might call the “greater good.”

This brings me to one last game I’d like to discuss: Fable III.

I know what you’re thinking: has this guy not played any new games since 2010? You’ve probably got a point. But putting that aside, Fable III is an intriguing (if somewhat flawed) game to examine here because it blurs the lines between what it means to be good or bad.

Choosing between good and evil has always played a key role in the RPG series Fable, which places players in the role of mythical heroes in the equally mythical land of Albion. However, while you might be called a ‘hero,’ you can certainly be a jerk if you choose to be.

In any case, the first half of Fable III sees you leading a rebellion against your tyrannical brother, the King of Albion, and you can make various choices that can define the kind of rebellion you lead along the way. However, it is once you overthrow your brother that the moral complexities of the game truly come into their own.

As it turns out, your brother wasn’t acting like a tyrant for no reason. Instead, your kingdom is facing a growing existential threat from a dark and powerful force that is soon going to invade, and you need to raise a whole bunch of gold to finance an army to defend your kingdom before it does. You then face a series of difficult choices.

Because of the kind of game Fable III is, these choices often come with a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek humour. For example, one choice you have to make is whether to build an orphanage that will drain your funds or a brothel that will do the opposite. The fact that the game developers enlisted British national treasure Stephen Fry to voice the character advocating for the brothel only adds to the surrealism.

Still, as the final battle moves ever closer, your decisions begin to weigh heavily on you as you try to determine which concessions you are willing to make for the greater good.

Do you do right by your citizens and try to improve their lives, or do you allow businesses to exploit them to make some gold? Do you honour costly promises you made to allies during your rebellion or do you turn your back on them to focus on the evil that lies ahead? Do you protect the beautiful land of Albion or do you exploit its resources? Whatever choices you make, the game makes you live with the consequences that shape the world you are tasked with saving.

I think it’s worth observing that Fable III is not the most challenging game ever made. Indeed, it is possible to be an entirely good guy and still make up the funds you need (thanks to a rather overpowered landlord mechanic). However, I still think it’s a fascinating premise. As a European living under the anxiety of a very real existential threat and watching our politicians face difficult choices in real time, this premise only resonates more now than it did fifteen years ago.

Now we might say: ‘you know what, real life is complicated and scary enough without games reflecting that. Aren’t games meant to be forms of escapism?’ But I think that’s akin to saying that books or films should only be escapist in nature. It’s not an either/or situation. We can — and I daresay we should — make time for games that test our moral compass just as we do for those that challenge our senses.”

In this sense, claiming that a game is nothing more than lines of code is no different from proclaiming that other fictional worlds and characters are merely words in a book or an actor on stage. Sure, it’s all just fiction. But fiction is a powerful thing — something that not only allows us to escape our own world but also to ‘live’ and understand different perspectives in other ones. It can teach us empathy while also allowing us to set that empathy aside and indulge ourselves.

I have always stood vehemently against the idea that violent video games lead to reprehensible behaviour in real life. It shouldn’t even need saying, but just because I cut down a guy with a lance in a game like Dynasty Warriors doesn’t mean I’d do the same in real life.

However, like a good book, an engaging video game has the power to influence our perceptions of the real world. Actually, video games offer one of the best mediums for developing understanding because, like a book, a game must be actively participated in. In other words, a game isn’t something that happens “to” a player, but something a player “does.” The more control a player has over their choices in the game and the more bearing those choices have on the game world around them, the more weight those choices carry.

Games always have and undoubtedly always will offer mindless escapism. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I daresay there is maybe something even healthy about entering a virtual environment where you can essentially put any moral obligations to one side without consequence or concern and let your primal instincts revel in ludicrous chaos for a while. You can pretend to be an ancient Chinese warlord or a navy SEAL and then come back to reality refreshed, and that’s all good in my admittedly biased view.

On the other hand, a video game can also be more than an escapist tool. It can be a space where our actions can test and maybe even build character as we visit worlds where the opportunity to be evil — to take shortcuts that benefit us at the expense of others or to allow morbid curiosity to take hold — dangles over us and tests our resolve to be authentic, good people. And the more murky the choice between good and evil, the more interesting I think that test becomes.

All that said, whether it’s shooting buildings with space lasers, lassoing unsuspecting townsfolk in the Wild West or giving an annoying NPC a gentle nudge off a cliff, I’ll still be making time for evil deeds and nefarious schemes in video games. But sometimes, certain special games make me think twice.